Music Video
The music video for "Hit 'Em Up" was filmed in a warehouse off Slauson Avenue near Fox Hills Mall in Los Angeles in May 1996. It was filmed by the production company Look Hear Productions. Shakur raps in a white room with The Outlawz, as well as in purple-caged room and a black room with bullet holes in the background. TV monitors in the background show clips of Shakur, Puffy, and Biggie Smalls, and even clips from the video "Made Niggaz." The video featured actors who were recalled from their prior roles in the music video for "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted" to impersonate some of those who were attacked in "Hit 'Em Up." This included Biggie, whose stand-in stares dully into the camera and sports a Kangol and jacket, similar to one Biggie would wear. During the moments where Shakur raps about his claimed affair with Evans, Biggie crouches near the camera while Shakur yells in his face. Puffy is also impersonated, appearing with a high-top fade and leaning towards the camera, lowering and raising his sunglasses.
During the shooting of the video, Shakur was engaged in an argument with someone, who was heard telling him "You'll get shot." His armed bodyguard ensured that he had nothing to worry about. Shakur had also broken up a fight his friend Muta had gotten into during the filming, and fired a production assistant on set. The assistant was answering Shakur's pager and returning his personal calls without his consent. Some of those calls were to women who became either confused or angry that a female assistant was answering Shakur's calls. The assistant had even mistakenly lost the pager, but by the time she found it Shakur had grown wary of her, so he fired her.
Like the song, the video for "Hit 'Em Up" has also been called "infamous". It surpassed the song and video for "New York, New York" in popularity, which was a pro-West Coast track by Tha Dogg Pound whose video featured the members crushing buildings in Manhattan. The music video for "Hit 'Em Up" can be found on Tupac: Live at the House of Blues DVD.
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Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
“Yes; as the music changes,
Like a prismatic glass,
It takes the light and ranges
Through all the moods that pass;”
—Alfred Noyes (1880–1958)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)